Fee revision for professional courses unlikely this year

COVID CRISIS

Fee revision for professional courses unlikely this year

A.RaguRaman@timesgroup.com

Chennai: 31.08.2020

Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the fee committee is unlikely to revise the fee structure for professional courses for 2020-21. The students joining professional courses are likely to pay the existing fees for both government quota and management quota seats in self-financing colleges.

As per the existing fee structure, colleges are collecting ₹50,000 for government quota seats and ₹85,000 for management quota. For accredited courses, they can collect ₹55,000 for government quota and ₹87,000 for management quota. “People are suffering due to Covid-19 crisis. There is a view that any fee increase will create more hardships for parents. The fee committee will soon take a decision in this regard,” sources in the fee committee said.

Justice K Venkatraman took over as the head of the fee fixation committee in March.

The fee committee announced that it would revise fees for BE, BTech, BArch, ME, MTech, MArch, MBA and MCA courses for three years from 2020-21. It also invited individual proposals for fee hike from colleges with documents like balance sheet, auditor income, expenditure statements and books of accounts.

More than 500 colleges have applied to the committee seeking fee revision for next three years from 2020-21. The colleges sought fee hike ranging from 25% to 40% for all the courses.

Following the Covid-19 crisis, now several colleges are prepared to run the colleges with existing fee structure for 2020-21.

“I don’t think there is any possibility of a fee hike this year in view of the pandemic,” said M A Maluk Mohammed, director and correspondent of MAM College of Engineering and Technology in Trichy.

The colleges need to honour their commitment and pay salaries to their staffers. Colleges also need to engage students with online classes. It is going to be a challenging year, he added.